


the shortest distance

by 26stars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, Empathic Soul Bond, F/M, Geminids Exchange, Pre-canon and Season 3 events only, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21778981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: In a world where you can feel your soulmate's emotions as if they were your own, your consciousness is truly the shortest distance between the two of you.~Team Earth Gemenids Exchange fic for apathbacktoyou
Relationships: Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie & Yo Yo Roderiguez, Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie/Yo Yo Rodriguez
Comments: 18
Kudos: 23
Collections: Women of the MCU





	the shortest distance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheQueenInTheNorth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheQueenInTheNorth/gifts).



> Hey! I know I'm posting a day early (and 200 words over the limit lol), but my weekend will be insane and the internet was working for a minute, so...ta-da! I hope you enjoy this fic--I had fun writing it and trying out a new pairing. Hope you're having a good December!

He’s in high school when he finally starts noticing.

Every year, on an unremarkable day in September, he suddenly feels happy almost all day long. It’s not a holiday, even outside the US, according to any of the reference books he checks, so, like most people in his position, he marks the date on his calendar and pays attention when it rolls around again. That year, on the same date he’d circled in pencil, he wakes up feeling…nice. A distant, glowing happiness like the subtle warmth of a radiator, smoldering in his chest throughout the entire day.

“That’s how it feels on their birthday,” Alfie’s mother tells him when he cautiously mentions it in a quiet moment that evening. He’d already guessed as much…plenty of cafeteria conversations at school had said the same, with classmates whispering each other’s birthdays to circles of friends in hopes of learning if anyone else had a strangely special day that day…

“Do you think that person knows when it’s _your_ birthday?” his mom asks with a smile, peering up from the quilt she’s been tying since the dishes were done.

Mack smiles and shuffles his feet as he leans against a bookshelf that he’s recently outgrown. “I don’t know if she’s figured out it’s my birthday yet,” he says, “but I’m sure she feels a little extra happy too on every February 27th.”

He can’t be sure, but he guesses his soulmate is someone at least a few years younger than him, since he didn’t start picking up on any unexplained emotions until he was nearly done with high school. Alfie’s mother liked to tease him that his soulmate must have been either not born yet, or the calmest of children, since he didn’t seem to have any of the early signs of the inherent connection most kids his age were going through. In a world where your soulbond’s emotions bled across space and time like radiation, plenty of kids grew up with extra volatile younger years, given that one child had to experience two childhood’s worth of tantrums and ecstasies. He didn’t necessarily envy his friends who seemed to have far more tumultuous adolescences than he did, but it did make him wonder what he should expect in the future, if he would experience the feelings of his soulmate’s childhood on the seemingly ten-year delay. Even after discovering their birthday and finally being comforted knowing that his soulbond was really out there somewhere, Alfie didn’t really notice too many changes. Sometimes an unexpected and unexplained feeling would wash over him—frustration, joy, fear, sadness—but nothing extreme, nothing he couldn’t handle.

One night in his early twenties though, he wakes up from a dead sleep because it feels like his chest is on fire, like someone is sawing through his sternum with a bone saw, and he gasps into his pillow. Across the room, his Academy roommate wakes too, concerned and annoyed as Mack tries to gasp out words, unable to explain what’s happening. The pain is absolutely real, the kind that makes him want to tear at his hair or curl up in a ball and weep, but thankfully his roommate doesn’t let him do either and hauls him down to the campus medical center.

A little while later, after rounds and rounds of tests confirm that there is nothing physically wrong with him, the doctor asks if he’s met is soulmate yet.

“No,” Mack answers. “Don’t know who or where they are.”

“Well, when you meet them someday, you can ask them what happened on this date. I can’t find anything actually wrong with you, so the problem must be coming from the other side of things.”

Three thousand miles away, a twelve-year-old girl is weeping on her bed, her heart having just been broken by a boy for the very first time.

~

Elena learns in her teen years how to cope with the foreign emotions that reach across the distance between her and her soulmate. Blank sheets of paper and stretched canvases become their landing pad; brushes, pastels, charcoal, and pencils are the shunts that relieve the pressure and let the feelings out in a safe place. Whoever her soulmate is, they don’t seem to get angry or sad much, but they do get stressed often, and they hold onto it in a way that sometimes feels like a hand around her throat.

 _What’s wrong today?_ Elena occasionally thinks in the mystery person’s direction as she gives a pencil free reign over a sheet of paper. _What happened? Tell me what’s hurting you._

Sometimes she searches the series of finished pictures, wondering if the other person’s subconscious guided her hand to give her a clue, however tiny, about who they are and where to find them. She never finds anything beyond depictions of the same anxious feeling that tends to make her reach for her sketchbook, drawing whatever is nearby or on her mind with frenetic, hurried strokes. The good thing for her, and hopefully for the other person too, is that art always relaxes her. She hopes, in the back of her mind, that they eventually felt her own emotions bleed through their stress, that the two of them balance each other in some mystic way, like fall taking the edge off summer.

One day in high school, she feels something a little new. A floating feeling, like there’s a warm ball of air in her chest, making her shoulders straighten and her steps more confident.

Several degrees north of Bogota, a young man shakes hands with Nick Fury and receives his badge, now an official graduate of SHIELD Academy.

~

He’s been a SHIELD agent for over ten years when he meets Nicole. She’s nice, exciting, and most importantly, she likes him back. They are on their fifth date when he asks her when her birthday is.

It’s not September sixth.

He shakes it off and still gives the relationship his best. They’re good together, the kind of good that makes him hope for a future together… _plan_ for a future together. He always thought that future would be with his soulmate though, and he can’t deny the facts: he and Nicole don’t seem to mirror each other’s emotions.

 _We’re both really chill,_ he tries to console himself. _There’s not of a lot of extreme emotions to feel…there could still be a chance…_

There’s a day a few months into their relationship though when he suddenly feels his chest crumple as if being beaten from the inside—shock and anger and grief flooding into him all at once. He’s at work, but he staggers to the office and asks for a sick day, rushing to his locker and grabbing his cell phone.

“Nicole, what happened?” he demands when she picks up.

“What are you talking about?” she says. “Are you okay?”

Nothing has happened to Nicole. But somewhere out there, his soulmate is suffering. These side-by-side truths feel like a slap in the face, and Mack can’t speak for a long moment.

“I’m taking the rest of the day off,” he finally mutters into the phone. “I’ll explain when I get home.”

That night, they talk about it, and she doesn’t decide to leave him. He’s relieved, because he doesn’t want her to go, but the seed of doubt has been planted.

 _We can make our own future,_ he tells himself. _God doesn’t play dice, but he doesn’t pull all the strings either. We can choose to be happy together, no matter what’s coming next._

A year later, a positive pregnancy test finally lets him and Nicole both feel joyful at the same time. In a few more months, they’ll feel the grief together too.

A world away, Elena will ride the roller coaster with them, her art turning completely blue, black, and gray for months, something that didn’t even happen when her mother died the year before.

~

By 2012, the blackness that colored 2006 has mostly faded to the background, and she’s not sure if the fear she feels as she watches the news coverage of aliens descending on New York City that spring is hers, or her soulmate’s. In 2014, she hears about SHIELD falling and feels a sick, fearful pain for days, one she has no reason to feel.

 _Did you lose someone?_ she thinks across the miles as she guides a piece of charcoal across a sheet of paper. _Are you in the middle of all that? I hope you are safe._

The nauseating fear subsides over several days, only to be replaced by a sick feeling of guilt. _Survivor’s guilt, or something else?_ she wonders. The guilt stays around for weeks, and she doesn’t know what she can do for this hurting person except pray for them, make more art, and hope they can borrow a little of her peace.

~

In 2015, Mack is in the middle of working with Daisy on the Inhuman Response Squad when out of nowhere, he feels panic. Confusion. Something that makes him want to lock the doors and at the same time run for help. He manages to keep his cool around the rest of the team, but he tells Bobbi and Hunter everything that night behind closed doors. The three of them speculate together for hours, imagining increasingly hilarious scenarios until he’s lighthearted enough on his own that he feels his soulmate start to settle down a little.

“Just beware, mate, if you’re feeling those things when you finally meet each other,” Hunter says from his position behind Bobbi, where he’s been tenderly massaging her healing shoulder while she works through stretches to restore her range of motion. “This one was nothing but conniving the whole first month of our relationship, and I really should have gotten a clue.”

“Looks like it worked out anyway,” Mack reminds them with a smile, trying not to feel jealous.

“Can’t stop destiny,” Bobbi grits out from behind a wince before she relaxes her arm. “She’s even more unmerciful than me.”

~

A couple of months after she gets her powers and only days after she and her cousin begin their organized attack on the local police, new faces and black SUVs appear in the area of her last raid. She watches from a distance, curious to see who the local terrorists have called in for backup, but she makes her first mistake by not changing out of her favorite “running shoes” before returning to the scene of the crime. One of the new strangers eventually looks up from scuff marks she put in the sidewalk and directly at her, the idiot wearing the evidence.

She acts without thinking—stealing his gun and then his car with him unconscious in the back.

She doesn’t feel afraid, but she notices that, across the distance, her soulmate suddenly feels very, very confused.

~

The moment the Inhuman in the containment module wakes up, Mack feels a hot spike of rage that doesn’t belong to him. He watches the woman zip around the small space, continuously bouncing back to her starting location, where she glowers through the glass. He calls Joey over to talk to the woman while he and Daisy watch their dialogue appear in English on a tablet, and by the time they get enough information to realize that this woman and her cousin are on the right side of things, the feeling of rage has morphed into panic, which Mack pushes aside as Daisy calls Bobbi and confirms the story—the cousin was found throwing the guns into the river.

A moment later, she and Hunter suddenly stop responding to their comms, and Mack takes Daisy and a car to track them down. He finds their car at its last known location, but the pair of spies are gone. The only person there is the woman’s cousin, dead from a bullet in the head. They bring him in on a gurney, and Mack is more upset about his two missing friends and the realization that the police must have their own Inhuman on their side than he is about the man’s death…until they get back to the plane.

“She’s been asking about him,” Joey tells him as other agents wheel the corpse up the ramp.

Mack looks through the window at the woman now sitting quietly on the bench in the containment pods. When he opens it and allows her to step out and wordlessly approach the dead man, it suddenly feels like someone has run a sword through his chest. The tidal wave of emotions nearly chokes him, and he steps away, letting the woman have a moment alone while he tries to get himself under control.

He doesn’t know this woman well enough to really be commiserating so strongly, but he does know how this feels, to look down at someone you loved and know that the future you imagined has ended here. Elena and her cousin had dreams of making their little world better and safer. He’d had a whole life of dreams wrapped up in a NICU blanket.

So in some ways, maybe he can sympathize...

The feelings haven’t subsided before it’s time to move again though, and he, Daisy, and Joey talk the woman into helping them go into the police station to rescue their friends and hopefully cripple the force a little further before they go. She agrees, and it becomes one of the easiest operations they’ve ever pulled off, aside from losing the laser-eyes Inhuman to a Hydra claw-machine aircraft. He doesn't even notice that there’s been a small current of _excited_ over the gnawing grief that has lingered since this afternoon until the excitement fades away as they all arrive back at the plane.

He sticks with Bobbi and Hunter while Joey and Daisy tend to Elena, then when everyone is resting comfortably, Daisy shows him the file on Elena she’s prepared to send to Coulson.

“Anything you want to add?”

He starts to read through it but gets hung up on the second line:

_Date of Birth: September 6, 1980_

He lingers there for a long moment before Daisy prods him back into the task at hand. When he persuades Daisy a little later to keep Elena on call for a potential Inhuman team, he tells himself it’s just because of how powerful the woman is.

The next morning when he offers Elena a smartwatch that doubles as a beeper for the team, they part with smiles.

There’s a warm glow in his chest on top of the lingering grief as she walks away, and he hopes it means what he thinks it does.

~

Only a few weeks later, Elena wakes up in the middle of the night feeling like someone has struck her in the chest with a hammer. Gasping into the emptiness of her dark apartment, she gropes for the lamp and switches it on. There’s no knife sticking out of her ribs and her pulse is almost normal, so when the pain doesn’t subside after several minutes, she reaches for her sketchbook. Pained, desperate strokes spill across the page, and as she works through the night, the internal chaos slowly distills into an emotion that has become familiar to her—loss. It’s sadness, but the disoriented kind, the kind that feels as if she’s stepped off a sandbar into unexpectedly deeper water, and there is only emptiness going down, down…

It isn’t any better in the morning. She makes a lot of new drawings that week.

Weeks later, a roller coaster begins. Panic, regret, and confusion churn around her, and she’s in the middle of worrying about them when her wristwatch-beeper calls her for backup. She catches a ride with Daisy to rescue the rest of the SHIELD team, and Mack isn’t sure if the excitement he feels when he opens the door and their eyes meet is his or hers.

~

Shit gets real not long after that, and as disappointed as he is to see Elena go, he has to admit that it feels safer than risking her getting infected by Hive. When he and May chase down Daisy in a nowhere town in the Midwest and he is airlifted away with multiple broken bones, he has the presence of mind to be glad that soulmates only share emotional pain and not physical.

Though at this point, for him, there’s probably little difference between the two.

He’s not happy to see Elena called back to the team—he doesn’t want one more person to be in the path of Hive’s gathering darkness.

“When good people begin to doubt and run away, that’s when evil wins,” she tells him as she gently adjusts the ice pack he’s been wearing strapped around his ribs. “You need a beer and a little faith.”

He glimpses the crucifix that he’d seen around her neck earlier and dares to ask a question.

“I know you believe in a higher power, but do you believe in soulmates?”

Her hands go still, and she steps away.

“I believe we have them. I also believe destiny doesn’t give us an excuse to do nothing.”

She meets his eyes, and something passes silently between them. To Mack, it feels like a challenge.

~

She’s still there when they get Daisy back, visiting his room before she retires to the room Agent Simmons had shown her to. She’s surprised to see sketches spread across his bed, a drawing pad just lowered onto his lap.

“Did you always love art?” she asks curiously, picking up one of the pictures—it’s a motorcycle, of course.

“I’ve found it relaxing at times,” he says, standing carefully up from his bed.

She smiles up at him, deciding to throw down the gauntlet.

“So I hear your birthday is February 27.”

She didn’t hear that. But apparently she’s right.

He looks startled, but not terribly surprised. “And you’re September 6?”

She nods. “Did you already know? In Bogota?”

“Not until I saw your birthday.”

She glances around the room, still looking for more clues.

“What happened not long after that? It felt like your heart broke for a while.”

He looks away, folding his arms carefully around his actually-broken ribs.

“My friends—the ones you helped us save from the police station—we had to say goodbye to them.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. She’d noticed that she hadn’t seen the two agents since then, but she didn’t realize they were really gone. “I’m sorry.”

“What happened to you in…2005?” he asks next. “Something awful—felt like I was dying for a few days.”

“My mother died that year,” she says with a nod. “But your bad year was the next.”

He draws a breath that seems physically painful. “That’s…a story for another time. It’s still hard to talk about.”

He finally meets her eyes again, and she marvels that a man that large can possibly look so unsure of himself.

“Well. I suppose you’ll tell me when you’re ready to talk about it then.” She steps closer. “Give me your hands.”

She leaves him with the crucifix, but she hopes it feels like a challenge.

Fate may have given them a destination. But only they can close the distance.


End file.
